NORTH OF THE WIND

.

Chapter Four: Ghosts on the Glacier

.

Summer, move forward and stitch me the fabric of fall
Wrap life in the brilliance of death to humble us all

How sweet is the day, yet I'm craving a darkness

As I sit tucked away with my back to the wall

The taste of dried-up hopes in my mouth
And a landscape of merry and desperate drought

Once I knew myself, and with knowing came love

I would know love again if I had faith enough

Too far is next spring and her jubilant shout

So angels, inside is the only way out

[Vienna Teng: Drought]

.

On the second morning, a pair of trappers invade my sanctuary. I hear them a little before noon, low unfamiliar voices outside, while I'm watching the kettle boil and waiting for Dart or Shana to wake. The trappers weren't expecting the cabin to be in use. They're discussing whether or not to help themselves to our Runners when I walk outside to confront them.

The first sees only a golden-haired woman alone, and his bristling eyebrows shoot up. His stouter companion other pays more attention to my scowl and the hatchet in my hand. " 'Scuze me, miss-didn't know anyone was at home," he says, bobbing his head.

"The First Sacred Sister of Mille Seseau is in residence here," I declare as frostily as any Sister can with her hair in a riot and three-days-old dress clothes sticking to her hide. I've had practice, though, and they believe me.

"Excuse me, lady," the chubby one corrects, elbowing his partner. "We didn't mean no disrespect."

I stare holes through them. I'm taller than both. "State your names and your business," I demand. Wink would have pardoned them first. They also might not have respected her, and this is how incidents begin.

I take note of their names; the pelts strapped to their packs verify their tale. They don't interest me. I cut them off in the middle of a long-winded explanation of their fortunes this season. "Have you any spare tunics or cloaks?"

"Er, yes, lady, but…"

"I will take them for my companions." I gesture imperiously downhill. "Return to Deningrad, and before you sell your wares, report to the Commander of the Holy Knights that Sacred Sister Miranda is well and in the company of the Dragoons." I pluralize it, although Shana can hardly be called that, or else rumors would fly about Dart and me. The trappers' eyes could stand to get a little wider yet, so I add, "I will consider not charging you for premeditating thievery upon my return." Then they are falling all over themselves to offer me whatever I like from their sad store of possessions.

Their patched clothing is rank with unwashed man-smell, but so is Dart's by now, and I'm little better. Once the gawping louts are on their way, I help myself to the thinner man's tunic and bearskin vest. They'll do for today, long enough to scrub my own clothes and the shirt Dart left on the floor and leave them to dry over a hedge. Still, I haven't itched like this since I was a girl.

Leaving Dart to keep watch over Shana, I wrap my cloak around my borrowed clothes and set out up the mountain. Usually, when I leave Deningrad, I spent the first few days cleaning and repairing the cabin and meditating at the shrine to Soa, and don't begin roaming until later. I don't have the tools with me to work on the cabin right now, though, and who could meditate with a flame-fingered Dragoon and an undying girl under the same roof?

I'll have to meditate with bow and arrow instead.

This section of the mountains has become as familiar as those where I was born, in the shadow of Kashua Glacier. First of all, I revisit the places where poachers lay their traps, by streams and deer paths. When I was a child I set such little letters of death, written with wire and snare, with my sad guilty father. Now I dismantle them. Twice I find rabbits caught in the snares. The first is frantic but uninjured, more or less, and I set it free to bound a little crookedly away over the slope. The second lies gasping with a barb through its neck. I break its spine and hang it from my quiver for supper.

I keep alert for prey as well as for the predators that might be unlucky enough to startle me. Mostly, though, I head for the glacial snowdrifts. They don't compare to Kashua in grandeur, of course, but they are nearly as old and have the same value to me. As I roam, I am also wandering toward them. I was born in a blizzard, a sense of snow ingrained, unlike Meru to whom ice is a treat for dessert or a trick Regole's soul loans her.

On my way, I whistle. I'm not hungry enough to worry about what I bag today. My Serdian visitors have left my stomach in knots.

The glacier bursts into view in a blaze of white, a perfect natural mirror for the sun. I shade my eyes and approach sidelong, or else it could blind me. The air takes on the peculiar clean, wet, still smell that I love. I breathe deep, and the image of Shana's white face, the smell of acid wrongness, fades away.

I lay bow and quiver aside and fling myself down in the shadow of the glacier, beside a rivulet of meltwater. Over my head arches azure ice, streaked with white like cloud. The sky is closer here, trapped under the ice. All around me echoes the music of history melting slowly to the sea. Soon the ground under me warms with my body's heat. I shut my eyes.

Oh Dart, you great big hopeless idiot, I think, why did you come to me? Any Dragoon could have failed him just as easily, and taken less harm from it.

I rub the heels of my eyes into my eyes. The sunbursts that follow look like the Divine Dragon's fire on the battleground of the Moon. I've never told the Queen or my Sisters about what Dart became that day-not when all of us still have nightmares about the Divine Dragon's roar alone shattered windows throughout the city. I understand Wink's feelings toward Lloyd better than she knows.

For a little while I simply lie there, basking in the glacier's shade and enjoying the singing of the birds. They're strangely quiet around the cabin. They must sense Shana dying inside. But my danger-sense won't let me rest long. My skin prickles with being watched.

I sit up, retrieving my bow. My human senses aren't as keen as those of the Dragon inside me, but still sharper than most folk. Still, I see no enemies approaching, nor wild beasts, nor Dart (and even without that lobster-red armor, he doesn't move with any sort of subtlety.) There is just the osprey, perched on a low-hanging limb some ten or fifteen yards away. Its presence doesn't seem to alarm the smaller birds, or the pika munching seeds on a boulder.

"This isn't your kind of wind," I tell it. "Now I'm sure you're following us." Maybe it spied Dart's armor while he and Shana sailed from Tiberoa.

The bird cocks its head sideways, predatory black eyes following my motions. I draw an arrow from the quiver and nock it to the bowstring. I have enough strangeness in my life without aberrant wildlife. I aim a shot to its right to spook it. "Fly away home," I tell it, and release the arrow.

A stray gust catches the arrow as it leaves the string. For an instant I think I'm about to hit the unlucky creature square in the breast. The osprey spreads its wings and dives from the branch, plummeting earthwards. The wind throws up a flurry of dead leaves in my face. When I lower my hand, a man stands there, the uniform of the First Knighthood of Serdio gleaming moss-green in the sunlight, a faded rosy bloodstain blooming across his chest.

After everything else, I am not afraid of ghosts, but the sight of this one rocks me like a punch to the jaw. The bow clatters to the ground. My knees buckle.

He bows his head politely. "It's all right," he says in that sunshine-and-summer-fields accent of the southeast. "You've got no reason to be afraid of me."

My father always told me that the soul was like a bird: peacocks for queens and saints, crows and cowbirds for the likes of him and me. A peasant's heresy, Bishop Dille told me; the official doctrine of Soa's Church regarding the afterlife is that we lie dreaming in the earth until our body melts away. I haven't known what to believe for a full year now. I've seen ghosts of soldiers still standing at their posts, souls drained and channeled like water in Mayfil's infernal pits. There is no room for the beloved dead in the branches of the Tree, though; the stillborn monsters of Soa's imagination would devour them.

What so many people in Endiness take on faith, I have seen with my own eyes and touched with my hands. Once, I was a true believer. The more I see, though, the less I understand. This world is a twisted one.

The Lavitz Slambert I remember is a tormented shade, suffering in the gloom of Mayfil, never to walk under the sun again. I've only seen him smile in oil paint on a piece of canvas that Dart kept inside his armor, with a hole now burned through the breast from the Setting of the Moon. I bite my tongue to bring moisture back into my mouth, and bite too hard. "I don't understand," I croak. "I thought you'd found your peace."

"That I did," Lavitz's ghost answers.

"How can you... Is there nothing after..."

"I'm watching over my comrades," he says. "Shirley waited eleven thousand years for her Dragoons to join her. I decided to wait as well."

Lavitz stands in the sunlight, solid-looking enough that the grass bends under his boots, but the light off the glacier cuts through him. He is still in a way no living person can ever be. The mountain around us is full of the sounds of small birds and forest creatures, but right here it seems so quiet that I just hear my rapid breathing and the absence of his.

On my knees, I flap my hand downhill in the general direction of the cabin. "You came from Serdio with Dart and Shana. You were following them."

"Following you too, Miranda. And the others. No one left behind. You're the first with eyes sharp enough to notice." For a moment the sun lays across his face, rather than behind it, and he's smiling.

My strength returns. I climb back to my feet and dust the dirt from my knees. "Then you know something's very wrong. With Shana."

"With Shana-well, her too. My poor little Shana." He forestalls me with a hand. "I wish I had the miracle fix for you, Miranda. I don't bring any great revelations. I'm still just Lavitz Slambert from Bale." He says it with such humility, almost embarrassment, as if that name wasn't being carved onto memorials this very moment. Knight, Dragoon, and faithful friend, in death as in life. I always envied the rest for having fought beside him.

But now, after his battles are done, it's me he visits. He says he has no answers for me. This isn't the part that crumbles my belief under me. I've always known Fate was a woman, and a bitch.

If the soul of Lavitz is free to go where souls go, and still lingers, then maybe there are still others who can tell me how to save Shana. "Where are the other Dragoons? Rose or Shirley might..."

He is shaking his head before I have finished the question, so I stop. "They've gone," he says. "All of them together, after all these years."

"What does-follow this?"

"I don't know yet." I'm relieved, a little; even that is better than some answers. Lavitz talks like a man at peace with his faith, not a ghost whose transient existence could come to an unknown end at any time.

Even dead, I suddenly envy him. He has already had his miracle and sold his life for something greater, while I'm left wondering my life could ever buy.

"If you don't know, then at least you can talk to me," I say, sitting again under the glacier lip. "I could use an ear." He follows; when he leaves the sunlight, he looks more fleshly and opaque, and simultaneously all the color leeches out of him. He remains standing. I have to look up toward his face. Standing, I'm taller.

He leans against the ice, insensate to the cold. "What are you thinking, Miranda?"

I study my ghostly companion's face, where bravery and kindness improve its homeliness. They say that dead men tell no tales. This one, I think, will hear my secret thoughts and never judge me for them.

"No one knows what's wrong with Shana, but somehow I'm supposed to make it all better. Dart doesn't see that I'm going to fail him. He just looks at her, and at me, with all this stupid hope in his eyes. I just want to punch him."

I turn a pebble around in my fingers and throw it at a nearby tree. It bounces off the trunk with a crack. "He doesn't realize we've been in the same shoes for the past few months. It's just the same as watching the Queen dying, except worse, because Shana's not even old." I glance up at Lavitz. "Except it's better, too. There's no one else watching and whispering and demanding things of me up here. Just Dart."

"Dart's the right kind of friend for you," Lavitz says.

I don't know what he means by that. "Boneheaded," I say, so I don't have to think about the alternatives. "Prone to fighting." We chuckle, and for a moment he looks real and alive.

It's a weak attempt at humor, though, and I lower my voice though no one else could be listening. "Even with all that's wrong, though, I was still-still happy to see him. I'd do anything if I could just heal Shana and send them home to their little village, but at the same time..." Honestly now, Miranda, I tell myself. "At the same time, I like having Dart here. That he came to me before anyone else, I just... I wouldn't care if we stayed on this mountain forever. But I think the price would be Shana's life, and I can't..."

The words are failing me. I don't know how to finish these thoughts in a way that makes sense, but Lavitz just nods slowly, like he understands all that I can't say. Maybe he does, if he's been watching us all. I try hard to put a coherent strand of thoughts together, and conclude, "Maybe Shana's already gone, and I'm not the terrible person I feel like right now."

"You judge yourself a little too hard. There are lots of people who admire the First Sacred Sister of Mille Seseau." He doesn't say anything about Shana's condition.

"Admiration isn't the same as affection." People have admired tyrants.

"The Queen and your Sisters love you."

"I left my Sisters in the middle of a public ruckus because I can't stand them trying to make me like them. They've got to be furious. I embarrassed all of us, and the Queen, too. When I come back there'll be hell to pay." Lavitz opens his mouth, and I cut him off. "I don't want to talk about them right now. I like my mountains better without the crowds."

He folds his arms over his chest. The rose stain of Lloyd's fatal stab remains visible. "There are the Dragoons," he reminds me gently. "You will always be one of us."

"You know, I thought I'd earned the right to be proud of that when we fought Melbu Frahma." I gaze up, past the green-blue lip of ice, to the place in the sky where the Moon once hung like a great opal. "Now I'm finding out how little power I really have."

"I thought the same thing when I died," he replies.

We lock eyes for a moment, remembering Mayfil. I turn my attention to chewing off a hangnail. The ghost is silent and patient beside me. I spit the fragment of nail to the side. There have been other thoughts keeping me awake.

"I'm worried about Dart, too. First the Black Monster, then Lloyd, then Zieg. He's always been single-minded, but now..." I can't say that he frightens me, not even to this ghost of a Dragoon who has almost certainly seen me lie sleepless at night, unable to close my eyes with Dart so near.

"You should be," Lavitz agrees. I start. "Dart's in danger. Caring for Shana is probably the only thing keeping him safe right now."

"Safe from what?"

"The Divine Dragon," he answers, and it strikes me that I have known this from the start.

"It wants him," Lavitz continues. "It's all tangled around that headstrong heart of his, just aching to let go. If it weren't for Shana, there would just be his own will standing between it and domination."

Dart is plenty bullheaded, but I've glimpsed the thing the Dragon could make him. Thank Soa that at the Moon, when it ruled him, all that hate and glee had been aimed at Frahma instead of us. The thought of it, set free once more, haunts my nightmares. "Love's strong, but it can't be that strong," I say.

"Not just love. He's a devotee of the Moon Child. We all are."

Lavitz says this so calmly that, at first, it seems like the most rational thing in the world. I'm nodding before my brain catches up. "Wait, what? That's impossible."

"Why did the Black Monster destroy entire towns just for having the bad fate to host the Moon Child?" he counters. "Everyone who comes into contact with the soul of the Virage Embryo is drawn to it. You who spent such a long time in contact with her, your comrade-you're bound to her, aren't you? You'd do anything for Shana."

"Almost anything," I correct him sharply, resisting the truth behind his words. All the while, a cold hard certainty settles into my heart. "It's not that, though. She's-she's a friend."

"She's that, too. We were blessed." He sighs. I hadn't known ghosts could sigh. Breath belongs to the living. "Other Moon Children have survived birth. Sometimes they reached adulthood. Some formed armies. Some conquered nations before the Black Monster brought them down. It's a quirk of fate, or Soa's will, if you prefer, that the one who escaped Rose's notice was the gentlest and humblest of girls. All she wanted to be loved, and all we could do was love her."

He refers to Shana in the past tense. I don't know if this phrasing is mere convention, or a sign. "And she loved Dart all her life," I finish softly.

"Yes." Lavitz nods, letting me follow that skein of thoughts to the end.

"They tell me that when they met again, he didn't think of her the same way, but in time he changed his mind."

"Yes."

"Did Dart have a choice to fall in love with her?"

"To tell you the truth, Miranda... I don't know."

He straightens and goes to the edge of the glacier, where the sunlight cuts through him like spears. "I told you, I don't have any more answers than you do where Shana is concerned. I've been watching and wondering, just the same as you. I want you all to lead long, happy lives before we follow Rose to what comes after, and I'm content to wait to find out." He gazes down the mountain with painfully clear regret. "But I suppose I'm not completely at peace after all. I'm afraid what will happen when Dart has no one anchoring him at all."

He glances back. "Dart is awake. You should probably go to him."

White fire ignites in my chest and rushes through me. The landscape around us blurs in a dizzying, gravity-defying whirl. In the blink of an eye, I have become the White-Silver Dragoon, the transformation triggered more by emotion than thought. Now I look down at Lavitz's ghost from even higher than before, my feet skimming just above the earth. These eyes are so sharp that I see his pupils contract against the brightness of me. He shades his eyes, although the light goes straight through his hand.

His smile is sad, and knowing. He understands what I've failed to put into words.

Wordless still, I descend low enough to pick up my fallen bow. A single beat of powerful, broad wings lifts me as high as the treetops. I turn away from the ghost and fly with lightning speed down the mountain, a white comet, a tiny second sun, too high above the earth for its heavy cruelty to weigh me down.

Dart sits outside on a fallen log, head in his hands, a rampart of wood chips surrounded his feet where he's whittled something into oblivion. No sign of Shana. Our clothes are still dripping on the hedge. He watches me descend, and the look on his face just about kills me. As soon as my feet touch earth, I am wholly human again and my eyes are stinging.

"I'd forgotten how pretty that Dragoon is," he says, which doesn't make it easier. I'm wearing some unwashed peasant's castoffs and I smell like uncured hides. He can't be talking about me until he adds, "Your hair's longer than I thought."

It's also snarled from flying. I focus on that instead of the sudden dangerous lurch in my chest, and sit beside him to untangle it. "I should chop it off," I mutter, "It's always in my eyes."

"Your eyes hurt, don't they?"

"Most of the time." I wear spectacles for reading and small work now, though never when anyone will see. I'm lightheaded with the quick transformations of soul and mind, the disjunction between talking with a ghostly comrade and now, the banalities of life.

He nods as if he understands, chewing the inside of his lip. "At the Moon, it got hard to see details," he confesses. I stop trying to comb my hair to listen. "Dragoons were alright, and Winglies too, and anything magical-even little things like Burn Outs-but human faces went blurry. Colors all weird. Like the ordinary world just faded."

"Everything looks different to Dragoons."

"No-I haven't transformed since then. That's how my world looks every day." His eyes are like blue coals. The last time I saw that hellish light behind any creature's eyes, the Divine Dragon had the rubble of my city caught in its claws. Dart goes on, while my hands curl into fists in my lap. "I knew it was you when we met at the gate, but I didn't see you clearly until just now. I could see Shana because there was another light in her. I meant it when I said she faded. I can barely see her anymore. That's why I like to hold onto her, making sure she's really there."

I'm not conscious of holding my breath until he turns toward the cabin and air rushes back into my lungs. "It's too quiet in there," he says. "Miranda, I'm so tired."

Then he sighs, and leans his head on my shoulder. We're the same height standing, but all my height is shins, so we fit surprisingly well. My shock over this observation delays my instinct to shove him away, and then he's so comfortable and warm and sad that I can't.

"I hear it," he murmurs. "It's always whispering in the back of my mind."

"Dart, Dragons aren't sentient."

"I know." But he doesn't retract what he said.

Not sure I want to stick my hand into this hornet's nest, I ask, "What does it say?"

"It wants to destroy."

I haven't been a Dragoon as long as the rest, and they had more or less figured out how the deal went down before I joined them. Still, I can tell that this is not at all right. Lavitz's warning echoes like a trumpet in the back of my mind.

With Dart this twisted-up and vulnerable, I have to be the steady one. I try to do this for my Sisters, the way Queen Theresa did for me, though I'm not as good. For now, I will hold my tongue about seeing Lavitz's ghost. We sit quiet for a little while: him heavy-headed and smelling just a little like woodsmoke, me disconcerted by how easily he fits against me.

After some time, his head grows heavier and his breathing slows in sleep. Before he loses his balance, I shift him to lie with his head on my knees. From there, I see the muscles twitch under the skin of his face, the shadows deepen under his eyes. I slide his red bandanna off and watch his brow furrow and smooth out again.

Careful, I warn myself. He looks so fragile, a warrior made out of tin, hollow and brittle. I can't imagine him as a husband. On the other hand, I never imagined that the Moon would fall from the sky.

I have found it difficult to find solace in churches since we killed Melbu Frahma. I don't know who it is that hears me, or whether Soa is interested in our little human hearts. I don't understand how the dead can have peace not yet knowing their God. Silently, desperately now, I pray for all of us, because Dart needs a miracle for Shana and I don't know how to give him one.

In this instant, though, one thought strikes me bright and clear as the sun itself: I'll be damned if I let the Divine Dragon take him.